Privacy policy
What we collect, why we collect it, what we do not do with it, and the rights you have over it.
In effect from · last revised
Lakatips is a place to read the news. There is no tracker following you between pages and nothing loaded from anybody else’s server, because we built the site so that there is very little about you for us to hold in the first place. This page sets out exactly what we do hold, why, for how long, who else ever sees it, and what you can require us to do about it.
1 Who we are
Lakatips is a Zambian news publisher based in Lusaka. In the language of data-protection law we are the data controller for the information described on this page: we decide what is collected and why. Our postal address is 23 Parirenyetwa Road, Rhodes Park, P.O. Box 32147, Lusaka, Zambia. You can reach us at info@lakatips.com or on +260 97 7708285.
We are a small operation, not a corporation with a privacy department. Enquiries about this policy go to the same address as everything else and are answered by a person.
2 What this policy covers
This policy applies to lakatips.com and to the email briefing we send. It is written with reference to the Data Protection Act No. 3 of 2021 of the Republic of Zambia, which is the law that governs us. Because Lakatips is also read by Zambians abroad, the rights described in section 16 are written broadly enough to cover readers in the European Union and the United Kingdom, whose own law may apply to them.
It does not cover the publishers we link to and quote. When you leave Lakatips for a newsroom’s own site you are on their property, under their policy, and typically in the company of their advertising and analytics. See section 10.
3 When you simply read
3.1 Server logs
Like every web server, ours records the requests it answers: the address of the page, the date and time, the HTTP status, the browser’s self-description (the user-agent string) and the network address the request arrived from. This is what makes it possible to find a broken page, diagnose an outage and recognise an attack. It is a technical record, not a reader profile, and nobody sits and reads it for pleasure.
3.2 Story counts
We count how many times each story page is opened. The count is a plain number attached to the story — two columns, the story and the day, and a tally — and it is what drives the “most read” list. It is not attached to you, there is no identifier in it that could be traced back to a reader, and it cannot be un-summed into individual visits. It is recorded when you open a story page and again if you use the button through to the publisher.
3.3 What that means in practice
We cannot tell you which stories you have read, because we have never known. If you wrote to us and asked for a list, the honest answer would be that no such list exists and none could be reconstructed.
4 Cookies and similar technologies
The one cookie is called lk_reader. It is set after you sign up to be sent on to a
publisher and open the link we email you, and its only job is to remember that you have already
done that, so we do not ask you again on that device. It holds a random value and nothing else
— no name, no address, no reading history — and it lasts a year. Clearing your
browser’s cookies removes it, and the only consequence is that you would be asked to sign
up once more.
There is a second cookie, lk_admin, which exists only for Lakatips staff signing in
to the admin screen. It is never set on a reader’s device.
We also store nothing in your browser’s local storage, use no web beacons or tracking pixels, and load no third-party script that could set a cookie on our behalf. The typefaces, the stylesheet, the small JavaScript file and every picture are served from lakatips.com. There is no font network, no tag manager, no social widget and no third-party analytics on any page.
One mechanism is worth explaining because it looks like a cookie and is not. Our contact and advertising forms carry a hidden token to stop automated abuse. That token is calculated from today’s date, your network address and a secret held on our server; it is not stored on your device, it is not readable by anyone else, and it disappears when you close the page. The forms also contain a decoy field that is invisible to you and irresistible to spam robots.
5 When you write to us
If you use the contact form or the advertising enquiry form, we store what you typed so that we can reply and so there is a record of the enquiry.
| Field | Where it comes from |
|---|---|
| Name | You. Required. |
| Email address | You. Required, because it is how we reply. |
| Telephone number | You. Optional — leave it blank and nothing is stored. |
| Subject and message | You. |
| Company and budget range | You, on the advertising form only. Both optional. |
| Network address | Your connection. Recorded automatically. |
| Date and time | Recorded automatically. |
The network address is kept for one narrow purpose: the forms accept at most five messages an hour from the same connection, and without recording the address that limit cannot be applied. It is not used to work out who you are or where you live.
A copy of the enquiry is also emailed to us so that it is not missed, with your address set as the reply-to so a reply goes straight back to you. Our own operational log records that an enquiry arrived and the address it came from, so that a message which fails to send can be traced.
Please use your judgement about what you put in a message. If you are sending us something sensitive — a legal complaint, a correction request involving a named person, information about your health or your politics — send only what we need in order to act on it.
6 When you sign up for the briefing
If you sign up for the email briefing we store your email address, the date you joined, the network address the sign-up came from, an unsubscribe key unique to you, whether the subscription is active, and the date we last sent you something. That is the whole record.
We use the address to send you the briefing and for nothing else. We do not sell it, rent it, pass it to advertisers or use it to work out what you read. The briefing carries no tracking pixel: we do not know whether you opened it, and we do not record which links you clicked.
Every briefing carries an unsubscribe link at the foot. Following it stops the emails at once, and it works without asking you to log in or confirm anything. You may also write to info@lakatips.com and we will take you off by hand. The same five-an-hour limit applies to sign-ups, for the same reason and using the same network address.
7 What we never collect
To be explicit about the things a news site could plausibly do and this one does not:
- We do not ask for, and have no way to store, a date of birth, a national registration number, a physical address or a payment card.
- We do not use your location beyond whatever a network address implies, and we do not look it up.
- We do not fingerprint your browser or device.
- We do not buy information about you from anyone, or enrich what you give us from any other source.
- We do not join up the enquiry records, the briefing list and the story counts. They are separate by design, and the third has nothing in it to join to.
- We run no advertising network, so no advertiser learns anything about you from us.
8 Why we are allowed to hold it
Data-protection law requires a lawful basis for each use. Ours are these.
| What | Why | Basis |
|---|---|---|
| Server logs | Keeping the site up, finding faults, resisting attack and abuse. | Our legitimate interest in running a service that works and is not overwhelmed. |
| Story counts | Ordering the front page and the “most read” list; deciding what to cover. | Legitimate interest. The data is aggregate and identifies nobody. |
| Enquiries | Replying to you and keeping a record of what was asked and answered. | Taking steps you asked for, and our legitimate interest in a record of correspondence. |
| Network address on a form | Enforcing the rate limit that keeps the forms usable. | Legitimate interest in preventing abuse. |
| Briefing list | Sending you the briefing you asked for. | Your consent, given by signing up and withdrawable at any moment. |
| Names in the news | Indexing and, where licensed, carrying published journalism. | Journalism and freedom of expression. See section 15. |
Where we rely on a legitimate interest, we have asked ourselves whether that interest is fairly balanced against your privacy, and kept the amount of information small enough that we think it plainly is. You may disagree, and section 16 explains how to object.
9 Who else sees it
We do not sell, rent, trade or share your personal information for anyone else’s marketing. There is no arrangement under which an advertiser, a data broker or a publisher receives anything about you. The only parties involved at all are these.
- Our hosting provider
- The site runs on shared hosting and is served through the hosting company’s content delivery network, so their servers necessarily handle the request and see the network address it came from. They act on our instructions and hold the database and the mail queue on our behalf.
- Email delivery
- Enquiry alerts and the briefing are sent through our host’s mail service. It handles the address the message is going to, which is what delivering an email requires.
- Law enforcement and the courts
- We will disclose information where we are legally obliged to — a court order, or a properly made demand under Zambian law. We will not hand anything over on an informal request, and where we are permitted to tell you that a demand has been made, we will.
If Lakatips is ever transferred to new ownership, the records described here would move with it. We would say so on this page before it happened, and the new owner would be bound by this policy until they published one of their own.
10 Leaving the site
Lakatips links out constantly — that is the point of it. The button through to a publisher passes through our own address first so that the story count can be recorded, and then redirects you. Nothing about you is added to that redirect and nothing is passed to the publisher beyond what your browser sends anyway.
Pictures are the part people usually assume works the other way. We fetch a publisher’s lead image once, on our own server, resize it and serve the copy from lakatips.com. Your browser never contacts the publisher while you are browsing our pages, so reading Lakatips tells them nothing about you at all.
The share buttons under a story are ordinary links, not embedded widgets. WhatsApp, Facebook and X learn nothing unless you click one, and then only because you have gone to them.
Once you are on a publisher’s site, their privacy policy governs. We have no control over it and cannot answer for it.
11 Advertising
Advertising on Lakatips is sold directly and placed by us. We do not use a programmatic ad network, run no ad-tech scripts and set no advertising cookies, which means advertisers get a position on a page and nothing else. They do not receive your details, they cannot target you individually, and they are not told who saw their advertisement.
12 How long we keep things
| What | Kept for | Then |
|---|---|---|
| Daily story counts | 90 days | Deleted automatically by the maintenance job. |
| Reader sign-ups | Until you ask us to delete it | Deleted on request, in full, including the referral count on the record. |
| Unconfirmed sign-ups | 48 hours | The verification link expires. Write to us and we will remove the record itself. |
| Feed-fetch records | 14 days | Deleted automatically. These concern publishers’ servers, not readers. |
| Indexed stories | 400 days | Removed from the index along with any cached picture. |
| Server and application logs | A short rolling window | Overwritten or discarded. We do not archive them. |
| Enquiries | While the matter is live, and a reasonable period after | Deleted. Removed sooner on request, unless we need it for a legal claim. |
| Briefing sign-ups | Until you unsubscribe or ask us to remove you | Deleted. |
The first three periods are enforced by the software, not by anyone remembering. The enquiry and sign-up records are cleared by hand, which is a candid way of saying that if you want yours gone today, asking us is faster than waiting.
13 Where your information is held
The database and the cached pictures sit on our hosting provider’s servers, and the site is delivered through a content delivery network with points of presence in several countries. In practice this means a request from you may be answered by a server outside Zambia, and that the limited technical information involved in answering it — the address requested, your network address — passes through that infrastructure.
We choose providers who commit to protecting the data they handle for us and who process it only on our instructions. Where the Data Protection Act imposes conditions on transferring personal data out of Zambia, we rely on those commitments and on the fact that the information involved is minimal.
14 Keeping it safe
The measures that matter most here are structural rather than ceremonial.
- The site is served over HTTPS throughout, so what passes between you and us is encrypted in transit.
- The database lives outside the public web root and cannot be requested over the web.
- There is no reader login, so there are no reader passwords to leak.
- Enquiry and sign-up forms are rate-limited and carry anti-automation checks.
- Everything a publisher sends us is passed through a strict allowlist before it is stored, so a hostile page cannot put working code onto a Lakatips page.
- Administrative jobs run from the command line, not from a web page, and refuse to run over the web at all.
No system is perfect, and we would rather say that than claim otherwise. If you find a security problem, please tell us at info@lakatips.com before telling anyone else, and we will treat it seriously and quickly. If a breach ever occurred that put people at real risk, we would report it as the Act requires and tell those affected.
15 People named in the news
There is a second kind of personal information on this site, and honesty requires that it be dealt with here rather than buried. The journalism we index is about people: a headline names a minister, a court report names an accused, a business story names a chief executive. That is personal information too, and it may be about you.
We handle it on the basis that indexing and, where a publisher has given us permission, carrying published journalism is an act of journalism, protected as such and recognised in data-protection law as needing room to operate. Lakatips does not investigate, does not add allegations and does not write about anybody. What appears here appeared first in a Zambian newsroom.
Practically, that has three consequences.
- The publisher is the right first stop. If a report about you is wrong, they can correct it and we cannot. Every story page names them and links to their original. A correction they make will reach us on their next feed update.
- We can still act on our own copy. If a story is corrected, withdrawn or found to be defamatory at source, or if there is a compelling reason why our copy of it should not stand, write to us and we will consider removing it, de-indexing it or reducing it to a headline and a link. Where a publisher withdraws permission, the full text goes immediately.
- We will not pretend it did not happen. We will not remove an accurate report of a matter of genuine public interest simply because its subject would prefer it were not findable. Where we decline, we will say so and give our reason.
Requests about a story go to info@lakatips.com; the copyright and takedown page sets out what to include so we can act without a second exchange of letters.
16 Your rights
Over the personal information we hold about you, you have the following rights. Some apply only in particular circumstances, and where one does not apply we will explain why rather than ignore it.
- To be told what we hold
- Ask, and we will tell you what we have about you and give you a copy.
- To have it corrected
- If something we hold about you is wrong or incomplete, tell us and we will put it right.
- To have it deleted
- Ask us to erase what we hold. For an enquiry record or a briefing sign-up this is straightforward. For a story that names you, see section 15.
- To restrict what we do with it
- Ask us to hold it but stop using it, while a dispute about its accuracy or our basis is resolved.
- To object
- Object to a use that rests on our legitimate interest. We will stop unless we have grounds that override yours, and we will explain which.
- To withdraw consent
- Where we rely on your consent — the briefing — you may withdraw it at any time, with one click and no explanation. Withdrawing it does not undo what was lawful beforehand.
- To take it with you
- Ask for the information you gave us in a common, machine-readable format, or ask us to send it to someone else where that is technically possible.
- To complain
- See section 18.
Exercising any of these is free. We will not treat you differently for having asked.
17 How to exercise them
Write to info@lakatips.com, or to the postal address in section 22, and say what you want us to do. It helps if you tell us which of the things above you mean and give us enough to find your record — usually the email address you used.
We aim to reply within a few days and to finish within 30 days. If a request is genuinely complicated we may take longer, and if so we will tell you before the 30 days are up and say why. Where we cannot be sure the request is really from you, we will ask one question to establish it — not a file of documents.
If we refuse a request, we will say so plainly, give our reason, and tell you how to challenge it.
18 Complaints
If you are unhappy with how we have handled your information, please tell us first at info@lakatips.com. Most problems are a misunderstanding and can be fixed in a day.
You do not have to come to us first, and you can complain regardless of what we say. In Zambia, complaints go to the Data Protection Commissioner appointed under the Data Protection Act No. 3 of 2021. If you are reading from the European Union or the United Kingdom, you may instead complain to the supervisory authority for the country you live in.
19 Children
Lakatips is a general news service. It is not aimed at children, has no content directed at them and offers nothing that would require a child to identify themselves. We do not knowingly collect information from a child. If you believe a child has sent us something through a form, tell us and we will delete it.
20 Automated decisions
The front page is ordered automatically — by how recent a story is, how many newsrooms are covering it, and in a small way by how many people have opened it. That is a decision about stories, not about readers, and it is the same page for everybody: there is no personalised feed on this site and no algorithm watching what you in particular read.
We make no automated decision that produces a legal effect for you or that significantly affects you, and we do not profile readers.
21 Changes to this policy
Two dates sit at the top of this page. The first is the date this policy took effect, which is the date Lakatips was registered; it does not move. The second is the date the wording last changed in substance — not the date somebody edited a comma — and it is the one to check if you have read this page before. Where a change is material, we will flag it on the front page and, if it affects the briefing, in the briefing itself.
We will not make a change retrospective. If we ever wanted to use information we already hold for something genuinely new, we would ask you first.
22 How to reach us
Lakatips
23 Parirenyetwa Road, Rhodes Park, P.O. Box 32147, Lusaka, Zambia
info@lakatips.com
· +260 97 7708285
Related pages: the terms of use, the copyright and takedown policy and our editorial policy, which explains how stories are chosen and ordered.